


Sometimes the White Picket Fence Isn't A Bad Thing or How Ryan Realized He Cared about Dunder Mifflin... and Kelly

by lodessa



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-02
Updated: 2007-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-07 17:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kelly isn’t the kind of girl he’d ever have imagined himself marrying, and really he wasn’t really that into the whole idea of getting married at all when he accidentally started dating her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes the White Picket Fence Isn't A Bad Thing or How Ryan Realized He Cared about Dunder Mifflin... and Kelly

“Here baby, I thought you might be thirsty.”

Kelly leans over the picnic table to hand him a beer, her strappy little summer dress gaping and giving him a nice view as she does. Ryan smiles and walks around the table to kiss his wife. She’s still cute and perky as the day he met her, in heels and full makeup. He looks around the backyard at Jeff and Mike’s wives in their shapeless mom jeans and oversized t-shirts, covered in food stains. Jennifer and Anna used to seem enviable to Ryan, with their law and business degrees and no nonsense geometric haircuts. He’d felt sort of embarrassed about his girlfriend being so… well girly. A few kids later, his friends’ wives are staying home with the kids just like any uneducated high school dropout could, and here is his guilty pleasure girl, now a mother of 5, finding a way to stay home with the kids, and make more than Ryan does half the time, while still looking ready to pose in a magazine. So yeah, Ryan’s happy with Kelly. 

 

Kelly isn’t the kind of girl he’d ever have imagined himself marrying, and really he wasn’t really that into the whole idea of getting married at all when he accidentally started dating her. He’d fallen into his relationship with Kelly pretty much the same way he fell into the job at Dunder Mifflin. He’d been waiting to hear back from the executive assistant job he’d applied for and the temp agency had called with the assignment at Dunder Mifflin. It wasn’t exactly a thrilling prospect, but his parents had decided they weren’t going to pay his car off unless he stayed employed, so Ryan had figured any job would do, just until he got that position of course. 

The offer never came; after not hearing back from a dozen different places, and a few interviews he obviously came up short next to the other candidates in, he still considered turning Michael down and going back to temping at a new place every few weeks. He could stop returning Kelly’s calls and nudge that pink toothbrush off the edge of his bathroom sink and into the garbage. His back right molar had really been bothering him though, and the temp agency didn’t provide dental insurance, so Ryan said yes to becoming Dunder Mifflin’s newest salesman. Kelly squealed in a way that still impressed him, after over a year. He could always quit later right? He’d leave just as soon as something better came along.

 

His eldest daughter, Pink Akaisha Howard, is showing the twins, Magenta Shriyadita and Fuchsia Madhurima, how to make flower chains. Meanwhile Scarlet Ladli has Ryan Ravit Jr. in a headlock. Ryan should really do something about that. Scarlet is somewhat of a favorite of his though, despite the fact that parents aren’t supposed to have favorites, for being the spunky little son that his actual son (the mama’s boy) so very much isn’t. Besides, it’s not like she’s really hurting him. Scarlet sees her daddy looking at her and releases her brother to skip over in the direction of the barbeque. Her hair is bound up in brightly colored ribbons, woven through braids her mother insisted on (Ryan remembers the screams that Kelly was hurting her). 

“How’s my girl?” Ryan grins, placing his hand on top of her head, where the hair is starting to escape its confines.

“Bored,” she says, leaning against his leg.

 

Boredom always reminds Ryan of his early days of Dunder Mifflin, back when he used to stare at the wall and count the pushpin holes in the cubicle dividers. Boredom was second only to the uncanny feeling he kept pushed back about how often Michael would come by his desk, “just to see how our favorite temporary employee was hanging in there”. He resisted the urge to report sexual harassment to the temp agency and get moved; because, he figured this way he could at least be assured of a great reference. 

Besides, that cute girl in customer service was always smiling at him and he’d been wondering how easy it would be to get her in bed with him. His college girlfriend, Cary, had broken up with him about 6 months before, and the chicks that he kept meeting at bars and mixers from his old frat were either too uptight or too far in the other direction to really even spend the night with. Sure, occasionally there was a total hottie in the mix but generally they never returned his calls afterward, and Ryan was sort of looking for a consistent booty call because looking for new ones all the time was a lot of effort, almost more effort than maintaining a girlfriend had been.

 

Jeff always wants to know how Ryan gets his wife to keep dressing up for him. He says it’s hard to be that interested in taking off a woman’s clothes when she dresses like some strange sort of yuppie hobo. Mike says that’s what secretaries are for, and the cute girl that works at the Starbucks by your work, and sometimes even the hot chick your wife invites into your house to watch the kids. Ryan’s always amazed how much effort Mike puts into cheating on Anna. He doesn’t know what to tell Jeff, though. He doesn’t do anything he knows of to get Kelly to wear those sexy little dresses. She’s just Kelly and she’d rather be caught dead than wearing something unflattering.

 

If they hadn’t been running late, because Kelly was changing her outfit for the 50th time, he would have missed the call when the family lawyer called to say that great uncle Marty had passed away and could Ryan take a flight home because there were details of the will that pertained to him. Those details were a small fortune that Marty had left to Ryan so he could start up that business he’d always wanted. Something better had come along. 

Mike and Jeff wanted to take him to a strip club to celebrate; Ryan had made some vague excuses about family stuff though, and brought Kelly pink tulips. Kelly liked pink. 6 months later he was still working at Dunder Mifflin. He kept telling his parents he wanted to finish business school before he made any big decisions about the money.

 

Pink insists that if they aren’t going to buy her a car when she turns 16, they should at least give her mom’s pink convertible (the one she earned for being the top Mary Kay seller in the tri-state area).

“But mooom, you like never drive it!” Pink whines from the passenger side middle seat.

“That’s only because I have to drive all 5 of you around,” Kelly isn’t budging.

“You are barely 15, this is a totally premature conversation,” Ryan tries to calm the two of them down. His eldest daughter is a little too much like her mother sometimes and the shrieking in a confined space isn’t the way he wants to end the day. 

Sadly they aren’t buying it, “Well if you don’t give me a car you are NEVER going to be able to drive it,” Pink argues, “If you let me have one I can totally drive Mag and Shia to school or whatever.”

Maybe Ryan should have fought Kelly harder on the kid’s names.

 

They were hanging out for maybe the second or third time when Kelly first brought up the subject of kid’s names with Ryan. He hadn’t said anything about how bad they were then because it wasn’t like he thought he was ever going to have kids with Kelly, and having an opinion would sort of give the impression that there enough of a possibility of that to discuss. Besides, he mouth looked really nice, and if he focused on that instead of the words coming out of it, it was a much pleasanter experience.

 

There are about 300 messages on his blackberry when he finally looks at it (Kelly insists that he leave the thing at home when they are doing family stuff). Half of them are from Michael, and he deletes all of them before doing anything else. It’s always forwards and random crap he doesn’t need to know, and he’s sure Michael will repeat any information that was at all relevant again tomorrow morning. They have a meeting with potentially big investors, and Ryan isn’t exactly looking forward to the 45 minute car ride.

 

Dunder Mifflin was really going under this time, and everyone knew it. Kelly started crying in the middle of dinner one night because, the last time Ryan thought they wouldn’t be working together anymore, he’d dumped her. He had sort of planned to really leave this time. Great-uncle Marty’s money was waiting and Ryan had been designing a business model for a company providing online servers and programming for class registration and testing for high schools. He didn’t get up and leave though. He didn’t sleep well either, and found himself with his laptop open, late into the night. 

The first thing to do in the morning was go to the bank, and then he headed into the city to make arrangements. It was ridiculously cheap to buy a failing business, and by the time night found him Ryan had that heavy feeling of the man who has just realized he really did buy that classic Mustang with the money he’d saved for a nice new Honda. So he started making calls and plans and considered the amount their expenses would be cut if they shut down the corporate office, since it wasn’t really doing anything and the rent was high. Before he knew it, the plan for his startup business and that for his salvaging one had merged and every theory he’d ever read had somehow been applied.

It was after midnight by the time he showed up at Kelly’s door and she looked surprised when she answered it. He was almost more surprised than she was though, when he got down on one knee, pulled out the ring that had cost almost as much as the company, and asked her to marry him.

 

“Ryan, are you almost ready to come to bed?” Kelly stands in the doorway to his home office; she’s wearing a tiny pink silk slip, and Ryan thinks that he can always look at this stuff tomorrow. The kids are asleep, the bills are paid, and Ryan wants to spend a little time with the wife he never wanted but is totally glad to have.


End file.
